Why Victoria Hervey’s shocking photographs are nothing new in the turbulent family saga

“I could no longer stay silent,” said Lady Victoria Hervey. In an interview this week, the aristocratic TV star and journalist, 47, detailed allegations of horrific abuse towards her sister, Lady Isabella Hervey, by Isabella’s ex-husband Christophe de Pauw.

Hervey, the eldest daughter of the 6th Marquess of Bristol, said her sister had been “broken” by the alleged mental and physical abuse, which she claimed included de Pauw punching Isabella in hospital soon after she had given birth.

She posted pictures of her sister’s injuries on her Instagram account, where she has more than half a million followers. “I have been really fearing for [Isabella’s] safety and mental wellbeing,” she told Mail Online.

“She was feeling that nothing was ever going to improve, and nobody was going to find out what he was really like.”

Isabella, 41, a model and reality TV star, and de Pauw, a Belgian businessman, were married in 2014 but separated in August. They have two sons and a daughter.

Victoria said she was pushed into going public after watching her sister being worn down.

“She was just so broken, and so depressed about the whole thing. A lot of it has been mental abuse, making her feel s–t all of the time, as well as physical abuse.”

In text accompanying the Instagram pictures, Victoria made allegations of infidelity against Mr de Pauw. “Christophe de Pauw should be put away,” she wrote. “He is a serial abuser. It has got to a point that we can no longer stay silent.”

In a separate interview last week, Isabella had made similar accusations. “There are many more images and videos, but the mental abuse was, for me, the worst.”

The Telegraph has contacted Mr de Pauw for comment.

The grim allegations mark the latest episode in a family saga that has been dogged by tragedy and notoriety for hundreds of years. The 1st Earl of Bristol, John Hervey, was a Whig politician who was given the title as a reward for his loyalty during the Glorious Revolution.

He had 20 children, including John, the 2nd Baron Hervey. An aristocratic literary type, John was embroiled in a tussle of love with the Prince of Wales over Anne Vane, and fought a duel with William Pulteney over a seditious pamphlet.

He was known to be bisexual, and had a 10-year relationship with a man, too.

The 3rd Earl of Bristol, Augustus Hervey, was a decorated 18th-century naval officer with a chequered personal life. In 1744, he married Elizabeth Chudleigh, a notable courtesan and courtier. Twenty years later he paid Ann Elliot, an actress, to come off the stage to be his mistress.

Later, he took another mistress, Mary Nesbitt, who had been a model for the painter Joshua Reynolds. The family during this period were endlessly short of money. Frederick, the 4th Earl of Bristol, died on the road in Italy in 1803, having had his assets seized by Napoleon’s troops.

There followed a period of relative calm until the 20th century, when the 6th Marquess of Bristol, Victor Hervey, Victoria and Isabella’s father, brought the family roaring back into the newspapers.

A playboy aristocrat who married three times and was nicknamed The Reptile, he did much to undo the work the Victorian Earls had done in making the Herveys respectable again.

Born in 1915, Victor went to Eton and Sandhurst, but was asked to leave the latter for bad behaviour. As a young man, he developed a penchant for theft, which led to his becoming the ringleader of a gang of jewellery robbers from well-to-do families who were known as the Mayfair Playboys.

This was the era of Raffles, the gentleman thief, but there was nothing civilised about some of their activities.

In December 1937, four of the gang were arrested for the violent robbery of a Cartier boss, whom they had lured to a hotel in Mayfair before coshing him and stealing £13,000 worth of diamond rings.

While Victor was not involved in that incident, and would complain people unfairly associated him with it, in 1939 he was sent to prison for three years for stealing more than £5,000 worth of jewellery, rings and fur from two properties in Park Lane and Mayfair.

The Recorder at the Old Bailey described him as the “mainspring of the conspiracy”, adding that “the way of the amateur criminal is hard, but the way of the professional is disastrous”. On hearing the verdict, his upstanding father, the diplomat and politician Herbert Hervey, wept in court.

Unlike some gentleman thieves, Victor needed the money. In 1937 he had declared bankruptcy, with debts of £123,000, more than £8 million in today’s money, having come unstuck trying to sell arms to both sides during the Spanish Civil War. Eventually his arms trading came good – he was one of Franco’s leading dealers – and he amassed a fortune estimated at £50 million

The eccentric stories continued. A couple arriving for a shooting weekend in Suffolk in the 1960s at Ickworth, the family seat, noticed Victor leaning from an upper window. As they drove nearer, he opened fire, forcing them to run for cover.

A family friend recalled passing the Bag O’Nails, a pub on Buckingham Palace Road, in London, where they were told Victor had “emptied a revolver into the ceiling”. He told a friend, Moira Lister, that he had shot two men in a mutiny whilst treasure-hunting on Cocos Island off the coast of Costa Rica.

A photo later surfaced of Victor, from the incident in Cocos Island, “standing with his foot on four dead bodies”. In 1979, six years before Victor died, he moved his family to Monte Carlo, vowing never to set foot in the UK again.

Sorrier tales were to come. Victor married three times and had six children: a son, John, by his first wife, Pauline; another son, Nicholas, and a stillborn daughter, Anne, by his second wife, Lady Juliet Wentworth-Fitzwilliam; and three, including Victoria and Isabella, by his third wife, Yvonne Marie Hervey. John, Victor’s heir, born in 1954, had an unhappy life from the start, despite his wealth and titles. Victor treated him cruelly.

A school friend of John’s at Harrow, Jamie Spencer-Churchill, said that Victor “created the monster that John became”. Openly gay and hedonistic, John was a fixture of the British tabloids in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to a stream of reported incidents: opening a champagne fridge by firing a shotgun at it; dodging a traffic jam on the M11 by driving at 140mph on the hard shoulder; constant cocaine and heroin use.

A friend remembered a party of John’s in a private suite at Claridge’s. “All the cocaine was on the left-hand side of the mantelpiece, and all the heroin was on the right. In lines,” he said. “You took whichever one you liked.” He was jailed twice on drugs charges and died in 1999, having lost Ickworth as well as the rest of his fortune. His half-brother Nicholas had died by suicide the year before.

Victoria became famous in the 1990s, the heiress-apparent to Tamara Beckwith and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson in the pantheon of witty aristocratic blonde party girls. Speaking about John in a Guardian interview in 2001, Lady Victoria Hervey described him as “evil”.

“What happened to him was just awful,” she added. “When you see someone lose everything, it puts you off. I mean he blew everything.”

In recent years she has not shied from controversy. A sometime girlfriend of Prince Andrew’s, she backed Ghislaine Maxwell’s remarks that the notorious photo of him with his arm around then 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre was “fake”.

“At the end of the day he says he’s never met her and he’s always stood by that,” she said. “If you look at everything, even when they did settle [out of court]... he didn’t apologise because why would he apologise?”

More recently she has embraced conspiracy theories, saying in 2021 that the Covid vaccine was part of a play by Bill Gates “to depopulate the world”.

Isabella started out as a model before several appearances in reality TV programmes.

She won the second series of Channel 4’s athletics competition The Games and subsequently appeared on Celebrity Love Island, Celebrity Masterchef and Sky’s Cirque De Celebrité.

Recently she has become an elite cyclist, representing the UK at the UCI championships in Glasgow. “I didn’t want to publicise all this, as I’m a private person, but things have got worse and worse this year,” she told the Mail after the split.

In another Instagram caption, Victoria said she was sharing “to give other women the courage to speak out as it took my sister a long time.”

The Herveys are due some happiness.

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